Chantal Lyons, one of our writers-in-residence is challenging you to write a haiku, in which you bring a wild or wild-ish place into being!

What’s in it for you? Well, your haikus could be discussed by Chantal and two other Wainwright Prize nominee authors, Polly Atkin and Sophie Yeo who will be Chantal’s guests at an online Salon on Tuesday 7 January. Not only might your haiku be discussed but it could win you a copy of one of their books.

So what do you have to do, precisely? Compose a haiku, and post it to the Bluesky social platform with the #hashtag #wlchaiku, and follow @walklistencreate You can enter as many as you like…but the closing date is Midnight GMT on Sunday 5 January.

So what is a haiku anyway? Aha! Originally Japanese, painted characters on scrolls, haiku included encoded messages to the readers about the natural surroundings the composer found themselves in. Matsuo Bashō (1644-94) was a walking poet and Buddhist monk who painted a haiku for almost everyday he walked. His poetry has been memorialised all over Japan. Following the Second World War, artists and poets on the west coast of the US and Canada reached out to their former enemies inviting them to share haiku. The western version of haiku stemmed from those early collaborations. People these days have even suggested they were the forerunners to texting emojis or Skeets and posts on social media.

School children are often encouraged to compose haiku as a simple way to introduce them to the power of poetry to convey feelings and experiences. School teachers quickly enforced a specific pattern of 5-7-5 syllables for a 3 line haiku. However, haiku-ists like to break rules, and frequently haikus don’t keep to this rule.

So…Chantal, Polly and Sophie are brilliant ‘wordsmiths’. They have written award-attracting nature writing, and in the Salon in January they will be addressing the theme of “how to write wild and wild-ish places into being”. Even if you struggle finding those few words for a haiku, come along and join the discussion, by booking a ticket here.

Here is something you won’t know….

Somewhere back a couple of decades I started getting interested in how to inspire people to write when out on a walk. I chose haiku as a way in which to rapidly engage people in a fun and collaborative walkshop. I tried pitching the idea to the International Festival of Haiku in Vancouver in 2011 but they weren’t won over. You have heard that expression, “if at first you don’t succeed…” So having won a scholarship to Bayes Business School in the City of London in 2016, I ran a series of haiku walkshops to test out tools for creative thinking and wicked problem solving. On those walkshops, I was joined by employees from Google and Meta, along with the British Library, the UK Government’s Department of Education and bunch of other luminaries. There could be something in haiku-ing, don’t you think?

Featured image: Haiku by Matsuo Bashō reading “Quietly, quietly, / yellow mountain roses fall – / sound of the rapids“.